


Shards

by carmenta



Category: Coldfire - Friedman
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-06-01
Updated: 2006-06-01
Packaged: 2017-10-08 05:55:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/73414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carmenta/pseuds/carmenta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You go to a far gentler afterlife than I will ever know," he said softly. "I apologize for the pain I must use to send you there. That's a necessary part of the process."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shards

Almea was no longer screaming.

It should have lasted longer. She was still alive – he had been careful to ensure that - but she seemed to have withdrawn from the pain. Too quickly; she should have lasted longer. Still, a small part of him, the part that raged against what he was doing, was relieved that she was not feeling all he did to her.

Gerald studied her for a moment, careful to avoid looking at her face, then raised the knife again. Blood welled up from the cut, crimson trails flowing down her side where they mingled with the pool of darker blood on the marble table.

Only a flinch, barely echoed in the fae currents caressing her limbs.

Not enough.

He tried again, cutting slowly this time. He felt her flesh shiver, but the pain did not seem to travel.

A deep breath, a moment's hesitation, then he laid the knife aside and moved towards the end of the work table where her head rested on the cold stone.

His hand's light touch against her cheek made her eyelids flutter, and with effort she turned her head towards him, unable to complete the movement. He saw recognition in her eyes, and fear, and knew that she had taken a step back from wherever she had fled to.

He whispered her name and watched her as she gathered the strength for one more plea, her voice hoarse from screaming. A promise that it would all be well, somehow, that she still loved him. That together they might find a way.

Almost, he ended it at that point. Her pain tore at him, more than he had thought it would, until he could barely stand it. All part of the sacrifice, and what made it so powerful. He loved her, more than anything save life. It made him feel every moment of her torment, even while he knew that if he could not go through, it would all have been in vain. Not enough, not yet; he could feel the darkness gather around them, but the invitation he had issued to the Unnamed needed more substance.

He glanced at the huddled forms of their two youngest children, pale and motionless when they had never seemed able to hold still. They had died quickly, and their blood had barely begun to pave the path. One slow, painful death; he had seen in his Divinings that it would be enough to seal the pact. But he had not yet fulfilled it.

Almea followed the direction of his gaze, and her eyes fell shut when she saw their children. Tears on her face, the first she had shed, and he wished he could do the same. Instead he took up the knife again.

This time she was consciously aware of it again, even though she no longer strained against her bonds when the blade followed the curve of her breast in the mockery of a caress. Dark red trails on her pale skin, a slow flow of life. Her flesh trembled under his hand when he slowed his work. He cut just a little deeper then, until the blood turned a brighter red. To her side, now, and he withdrew again when he felt the blade scrape against bone.

The currents thrummed with her pain, so dark in texture. For the first time the dark fae seemed almost reachable to him, a realization he shied away for an instant before he accepted it. A step towards his goal, away from all he had been. Not that there was any going back now.

She gasped when he set the point of the blade down where her breastbone ended and the soft, unprotected plane of her abdomen began. Instinctively she tried to twist away, struggling weakly. He waited, watched as her fear seeped into the currents. Then he put pressure on the knife and her gasp turned into a breathless supplication.

He had sworn to protect her, shelter her and keep her safe. A vow he could no longer keep, not if he wanted to live. And hadn't she sworn the same? She loved him. She had fought his battles, this last year, against king and Church. She had been the strong one.

He wondered whether she wouldn't have been willing to give her life for him, had he asked. That she would take the torture in her children's place, he had been sure of, and because he loved them, because he loved her, she now lay on the table and not Alix, or little Tory.

Her skin parted easily against the honed knife. A quick, slanting cut, and once more he withdrew to study the line from sternum to navel. She lay a little to the side, making the blood flow to the left while the right half remained unblemished. Her breaths were shallow pants, her eyes wide open as she watched him lay his hand on her gently curving stomach. How often he had touched her like this, feeling her warmth, the presence of three unborn children a bare whisper in the fae. She had hoped for a pregnancy, he knew, a child to draw him back from the edge.

A pained whisper, a disjointed promise of her love. It cut into him, deep inside, just as his knife cut into her torso, and he struggled against his instincts screaming at him to withdraw. He wanted her pain to end, more than almost anything in the world, and that drove him on. The currents darkened further when he continued his careful incisions; they grew stronger in texture until they were just short of deafening in their roar.

It was the only way. He reminded himself of that as he continued, barely grazing the skin at times, then cutting down to bone. Her blood flowed freely now, the deep red a spreading calmness in the dizzying colours of the currents. It was his focus, hot and wet under his fingertips when he touched the fresh wound where thigh joined hip. Sticky; he wiped his fingers against his tunic to clean them.

His name, a sigh upon her pale lips. So precious. A strained intake of breath. Then she stilled.

The currents washed over him at a sudden, too strong to control, and with them the stench of an alien presence. Even though he had barely felt it before, he recognized it now.

_The offer is accepted_, the countless voices hissed, _under the terms proposed before._

_My soul_, he asked, drawing up all the strength he could muster, all the determination. _It was not part of the compact._

Hesitation, displeasure, anger, all mingled into a rasp of a thousand voices. _It remains yours. What is left of it._


End file.
